


Jakku, again.

by kitewolf



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: FN-2187 is a good stormtrooper, Finn-centric, Gen, Groundhog Day, Was a good stormtrooper, Zeroes Nines and Slip all make appearances, allusions to torture and character death, fighting on Jakku
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-07
Updated: 2016-06-04
Packaged: 2018-06-06 16:14:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6761068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitewolf/pseuds/kitewolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Finn didn't rescue Poe. Not the first time, anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for  this prompt  on the kinkmeme:
> 
> "Finn doesn't rescue the captured Resistance pilot. Instead, he's forced to execute him to prove his loyalty/begin his reconditioning/etc. It's awful and traumatizing, but at least Finn has a memory wipe to look forward to as part of the reconditioning process.
> 
> Then he wakes up the next morning and it's that same day. And he keeps waking up and keeps waking up and keeps waking up trapped in that same day, until he finally gets it right."
> 
> It diverged slightly from the original prompt; apologies for that. But it was a great prompt and I had fun writing it.

It makes sense when he realizes it’s a training sim. He thinks he must have messed something up during the Jakku conflict and they want him to correct it.

So, when Kylo Ren orders the corralled villagers shot a second time he makes himself raise his blaster and shoot.

He realizes it’s repeating again the next morning at breakfast when Nines makes the same nervous crack about their first real mission. He’s so surprised to hear it for the third time, he misses his own bit-off reply and the conversation lulls – but command will hardly be faulting him for that.

It had taken him until the start of the fighting the day before to realize that it was a training sim. Disoriented, he’d been sloppy and off his game and, he admits to himself as he frowns at his gruel, he had shot when Kylo Ren commanded but had only hit one person.

He resolves to do better. He forces himself to shoot and shoot again that morning. They’re just simulations now, after all. He’s done this before. It should be easy. It doesn’t matter because they aren’t real.

He does it ten times as perfectly as he can, just in case they’re being careful, making sure his actions are deliberate, and that he’s learned his lesson. When he wakes up on the eleventh morning and the simulation hasn’t ended, he decides to change tactics.

Zeroes makes a pointed jab at him as they head into the mess. He’s wound too tight, too noticeable. He wants desperately to punch Zeroes in his lofty nose.

Nines makes his joke over breakfast.

He had conducted himself as well as he thought he could before, but now he concentrates on running through the sim without the slightest flaw. He handles the repetition well, like that. Each run is another chance to change his footing, alter the path of a bullet, correct his errors.

Eventually he gets to know the Jakku conflict like a dance.

Exit the carrier under cover from the other troopers, shoot the figure in the foreground, because otherwise he will shoot Zeroes, who’s following FN-2187 down the ramp. Turn, shoot the two using the market deliveries for cover – he doesn’t even have to take time to aim now.

Walk in sync with his unit. Shoot, shoot, cover, pull Slip down to miss the shrapnel, shoot.  
None of the troopers within his range die. Not one.

He wonders if that’s the wrong solution. Captain Phasma has told him before that he’s too careful of his fellow troopers. This sim can’t possibly be designed to encourage that. But he can’t see the value in just letting them die when they don’t have to. Even the Captain would admit that troopers are investments that warrant protecting when it doesn’t jeopardize the mission.

There’s a moment, just a moment, at the end of the fighting if he stands in the right place at the right time and with perfect, eager posture. The Unit Commander looks to him and orders him and Nine Nine to search their new prisoner’s X-Wing before destroying it. If he’s doing that, he misses the massacre entirely.

Repeat repeat repeat.

Nothing he does is working.

He lets his team members – he lets any storm trooper – die.

But Nines makes the same tired joke at breakfast the next morning. He goes back to watching their backs on the battlefield.

He hates going to the hot, sandy planet more than the never ending simulation.

He discovers that the day doesn’t reset at any specific point. It continues until he goes to sleep. So, he takes his turn in the refresher back on board the main ship and then heads to third shift duty assignment rather than the barracks. One day stretches into two… but if he stretches it into three Captain Phasma will become so disgusted with his performance that she’ll order him corrected.

Sleep deprivation makes him react oddly to orders and see things that aren’t there. Even though none of it is. It isn’t real. It’s not real.

Why can’t he break the cycle?

The technicians put him to sleep after debriefing, before correction, and he wakes up two days ago, again.

By now he can tell it’s the same morning just by the rhythm of breathing around him, the cadence of Slip's snore, and the particular shuffling of the earliest risers.

Sometimes he takes a few moments, lying there in the bunk before most of the others are awake, just to turn his hand over in front of his eyes. Is he aging? A few hundred days isn’t enough for him to be able to tell. After ten thousand days will his skin wrinkle? Could he die, truly, of old age? In twenty thousand days? Fifty? One hundred thousand?

He’s learned, by then, that a normal death only resets the scenario. If he’s killed coming off the carrier, or later in the battle, or decommissioned after because he’s raised his blaster and aimed it at Kylo Ren—

No. An ordinary death changes nothing.

In the morning they board the carrier and go back to Jakku.

FN-2187 would die a hundred times in a row just to never return to Jakku again.

He might not have so much trouble if they had gone anywhere else, literally anywhere else. Why did their first real mission have to be against untrained villagers taken by surprise and killed for spite?

Sometimes he kills their commanders, because they’re the reason he’s trapped in this endless hell. He knows they must be the ones running the sim. And he’s no longer convinced obedience will save him. He’s not even sure any more if the first day ever really happened or if the entire thing was a simulation from the start.

He can’t guess at what the purpose is besides punishment, but he’s also at a loss as to what he did to deserve it.

Once, once, Nine Nine is killed in the fighting and no one replaces him at FN-2187’s side at the right moment. He’s sent to search and destroy the prisoner’s X-Wing alone. When it explodes and knocks him backwards he lays on the ground staring up at the sky until it tilts into the dark. It had been hours and he hadn’t been unconscious or dreaming. The battalion had left long ago, leaving him with the dead.

He wakes up in the barracks.

His escape attempts are largely futile. He’s never been trained on a TIE fighter and after the first few dozen attempts it’s obvious that he’s not going to learn in the ten minutes snatched between gaining the cockpit and being dragged out. Not unless he’s willing to repeat it a few thousand times more.

If he flees on foot, planetside, he’s either killed by bandits before dark or he lives long enough to collapse in exhaustion and fall asleep.

He tries to steal the X-Wing once, before it can be destroyed, but its controls are even more confusing than the TIE fighter and he’d just killed Nine Nine for nothing.

There’s no other way off the station once they return, save reconditioning which _doesn’t work_.

In the beginning he’d spent a handful of days figuring out how to convince Captain Phasma to let him into the prisoner’s interrogation. By then he knew that none of the storm troopers would be successful at getting information out of him, and he’d thought that if he could be the one to do it –

He hadn’t been. And he’d only ever talked himself into it once. Ever since that day, he’d memorized the duration of the interrogations and fastidiously avoided that corridor, where the prisoner was kept, until well after they were done. His room-turned-cell wasn’t sound proofed and the screams echoed.

The screams echoed in his dreams, sometimes, mixing with the screams of the villagers that afternoon, and the screams of his fellow Stormtroopers that morning.

He thought about storming the cell and just ending the prisoner’s agony.

He’d never interacted with the prisoner himself, not even during the one disastrous interrogation sit-in. In the beginning, he’d tried killing him during the conflict, before he could shoot at Kylo Ren, but it was distracting and he’d tired of it. And he’d inspected the man’s X-Wing hundreds of times by now. He knew the picture the man kept tucked into his cockpit frame, he knew what notch he kept the seat at and that the radio was set to play soft music. He knew the man’s call sign and that he was vain enough to keep a comb tucked below the controls. He knew the man could fly an X-Wing.

That morning he’d fumbled the planetside conflict. It was the first time Nines had died, ever. He didn’t know what he’d done differently, after hundreds of runs, and he’d been so caught off guard that he’d missed his mark after the fighting died down and been ordered to shoot on the civilians for the first time in ages.

Nines’ blaster had exploded in his grip and in his last motion he’d reached up to touch FN-2187’s faceplate. The dirty streaks his touch left ran across his vision.

He couldn’t even bring himself to aim his blaster at the huddled group before them. They screamed and screamed.

When he tore his helmet off on the ship he could finally see the dark red of the smears Nines had left there.

He only ever sav—he only ever stole the prisoner the one time.

By then he could have gone anywhere he wished on the ship and had a reasonable excuse ready. Sometimes he’d done it wavering on his feet from sleep dep, which was more obvious than his jangling nerves. The guard didn’t even question him. He collected the prisoner with Kylo Ren’s name on his lips and shoved him into the closest deserted corridor.

“Listen carefully. If you do exactly as I say I can get you out of here.”

He’d had a surprising number of first conversations that day. First time he told Zeroes and Slip that Nines was dead. First time Captain Phasma had had to tell him to put his helmet back on.

But

“You need a pilot.”

He’d seen right through him. For countless days, every conversation FN-2187 had had been either scripted or full of easily swallowed lies while he tried not to reveal things he had no way of knowing. It was probably the first time he’d wanted to smile since this had all started.

The newness was like electricity under his skin, crawling bright and restless. He led them through the bay to his chosen TIE fighter with his blood practically singing. Even the resulting disaster wasn’t enough to quell the excitement. Next time he’d know to unclip the fighter before they got in. He turned the guns on his fellow troopers to get the practice more than anything. Next time they’d make it to the hanger forcefield before anyone had even noticed.

But then, they snapped free of the mooring line. They were out in free space.

He practiced shooting the turrets.

He didn’t need to practice. He was good.

Unbelievably – incredibly – they succeeded. He was going to ride out of this nightmare with the prisoner – Poe. Poe Dameron. On the first try.

Except the jackass wanted to go back to Jakku. And then they were shot down.

He spat sand out of his mouth when he woke up, groaning, aching, hot. Everything hurt and there was a burning line of pain across his shoulder where his armor must have pressed.

A quick panicked breath. He closed his hands on sun-hot sand. He’d just woken up. Suddenly, he wanted to cry for the sand up his nose and gritting up the corners of his eyes.

He’d done it. He’d broken the cycle. He was free.

He was also alone.

The TIE fighter disappeared into the sand when he found it, taking every trace of Poe Dameron’s body with it except the hastily snatched jacket. Nines was dead, maybe for real this time. He’d killed all those people on the station, maybe for real.

Finn had escaped, but he’d blown up the whole world to do it. And now he was stuck on bloody Jakku, utterly alone.


	2. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After Starkiller base, Finn still has a lot to deal with but he doesn't actually have to do it alone.

When Finn wakes up it’s all at once in a cold sweat and he can still hear the screams echoing.

He'd never told Rey because, well there hadn't been time, had there? What? Was he going to come up behind her with Han Freaking Solo two feet away and say, “Guess what? I’ve just spent literally thousands of days trapped in a sim and, oh yeah, I spent the time repeatedly murdering children.”

Bonding!

He was still pretending to be a Resistance fighter, then. And she wouldn’t have believed him anyway.

She wouldn’t have.

She would—

No, listen.

It had taken him nearly two days of walking to make it to the marketplace where they met. Except maybe it had only taken one.

Before everything with Starkiller Base happened, before Rey was awakened as a Jedi – that’s what happened! – before that, he was still trying to get used to everything being real. When he first stumbled into that marketplace, he’d had no way of knowing if it was real.

There were two options: Either he was still in the sim or it had never been a sim.

If he had really left the training sim, he should have woken up in the VR room in the haptic chair. He thought… Maybe he’d tripped some sort of… proximity trigger. Or something. And now he would wake up for the next thousand days with sand in his mouth and the sun on his back.

If it had never been a sim, then maybe he truly was free but he was probably also mentally compromised. There was no guarantee it wouldn’t happen again, either.

He tried not to think too much about either option.

If Poe had been the first person to look at Finn and see what he was, Rey was the first person to look at him and see what he could be.

_“So you’re with the Resistance?”_

Remember? She’d said that with a mouthful of hope and awe and legend. She’d been so excited. He had wanted to be that. More than he’d wanted to be a traitor and a murderer.

He’d wanted to stay with her, too. But they could have died ten times over just in that first half hour. At any moment he might wake up two sand dunes over from a smoking TIE fighter. He had tried his best to hold on to her. He’d lost Poe, but maybe if he held on he could drag Rey back with him when they died.

Wake up with her solid on the bunk next to him, Slip snoring to the left, and Zeroes’ hand dangling down from the bunk above.

Well, alright, he hadn’t thought he could pull that off. He knew that if he was going back, he was doing it alone. He’d just wanted to hold her hand until then.

No, it’s fine. No. That’s not sweet.

Listen.

Listen.

He’d been so relieved to wake up on the Millennium Falcon, he’d nearly cried again. But he’d wondered if, somewhere back on that planet, a squadron of Stormtroopers was landing without him. Maybe an old man was being cut down by a light saber. Maybe a resistance pilot was being led past his own suspended blaster shot.

Did it matter that he hadn’t shot at the civilions, that last time? He hadn’t had any problem shooting his fellow troopers.

They’d massacred an entire village that day.

They were going to do the same thing on Takodana.

Finn had no trouble with that, either. Five minutes with a light saber in his hand and he was spearing straight through a white armored chest.

It’s the armor. You can’t see the faces. He’d always thought it was supposed to be intimidating, but it’s not. It’s freeing.

He hadn't even suspected that it was his old command until Slip had thrown down his shield and shouted, “TRAITOR!”

No. It’s fine. Really. Just –

Okay.

Listen.

Slip had always been destined to die fighting, if he didn’t die stupid. Finn wasn’t surprised when Solo blasted him off of him. He was relieved.

("Hey, Rey. I think I've probably spent more time on Jakku than you. Isn’t that funny?”

They hadn’t exactly had a lot of down time.)

Seeing Slip die wasn’t the same as watching Rey being taken. Seeing her in Kylo Ren’s arms, limp and helpless. He’d been carrying her, almost in some sick parody of care. He should never have let her go. He should have been at her side.

He’d killed so many crying children on Jakku. He’d killed Poe, too. Over and over. He’d listened to him on the ship, begging to die.

If that hadn’t been real, was it real when she was taken?

Finn hadn’t really believed, not since they’d crash landed, that any of it was real. He expected every night to wake up in the barracks. Slip snoring to his left.

He hadn't believed until he saw Poe on the airfield and the world spun and slotted into place around them.

Poe had looked at him and seen. Rey had looked at him and seen more. Now, Finn didn’t need to see himself in Poe’s eyes to know who he was, who he needed to be. He’d known then that they could save Rey, together.

He believes, he really does.

But, sometimes, he still goes to sleep expecting to wake up with a mouthful of sand. Sometimes he wakes up and waits to hear Slip’s snore. And then it’s okay. Rey is pressed up against his back, warm and solid.

When Finn wakes up he can still hear the screaming. But he can pull Poe closer until his lips are soft and relaxed at his shoulder. Proof his ears are lying.

And when he wakes sudden, heart pounding, they’ll both be there to ask him what’s wrong and to listen to the answer.


End file.
